Havenfall (Havenfall #1)(23)

“What is that?” I choke out. My thoughts fly in all directions. The office is a mess, papers littering the floor. On the far side of the room, a spill of ashes trails out from the fireplace. Something wet and dark as ink seeps over the exposed flagstones. My heart pounds painfully against my ribs and my ears buzz as I try to process what I’m seeing.

A body.

Blood.

Fear fills me up, and I lurch toward the bundle. Willow steps back, and Sal makes a grab for me, but I’ve already seized a corner of the rug and yanked it up, held by a wild, terrible fear that it’s Brekken, that something’s happened to him, that whatever he seemed afraid of earlier closed in.

But instead, as the wrap of carpet unrolls, I see indigo fur, claws, a bloodshot eye, all of it sodden with dark blue blood.

A beast.

A Solarian.

My palms are stained blue. For a second, I’ve forgotten how to breathe. I’m convinced that this is it. I will die of a heart attack right here, right now.

To see one like this, up close. It’s too much.

Someone grabs my arms. Graylin. He pulls me up and away, and I feel his hands shaking. “For skies’ sake, don’t look, Maddie.”

I stare at him, too stunned to think anything at all. Then Marcus’s prone form behind him draws my gaze. I don’t see any injuries, but he is ghost-white and oh so still, his chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly. The Silver Prince stops pacing to meet my eyes. He looks bone-pale and furious.

“What’s wrong with Marcus?” I croak, unable to tear my eyes away from Marcus’s closed eyes, his empty face.

“We don’t know yet,” Graylin says, keeping his hand on my shoulder. “We think the Solarian attacked him.” He looks distraught, with dark circles under his bloodshot eyes.

My stomach drops even further. Soul-eaters. That’s what Solarians are. They devour your soul before destroying your body. Is that what happened to Marcus?

Graylin moves his right hand in a complicated motion over my uncle’s form, and the air between his hand and Marcus’s chest shimmers. Fiorden healing magic. But can it undo the damage from a Solarian attack? I don’t know. My heart beats unevenly, nausea coiling in my stomach. All I can manage is, “What happened?”

The Silver Prince moves, kneels by the Solarian’s corpse and peels back the carpet for a moment. I close my eyes as a spill of curses in a language I don’t recognize fall from his lips. The air in the room heats up, and a hot breeze whips my face as he dips his fingers in the blue blood. In his other hand, he clutches a silver bangle stained with something red.

“I killed this beast after it killed my manservant,” he hisses, rage and disgust boiling off him and infecting the room. “It ate him. Not even bones left.”

His manservant.

The thin man with the colorless eyes, watching silently on the ballroom floor as I spilled my fears of not belonging to the Silver Prince.

He’s dead? Eaten?

The Silver Prince looks up at Graylin. “You need to question the Fiorden delegation. Find out what the soldier was doing down here.”

“What soldier?” I hear myself ask.

The Silver Prince looks squarely at me, suspicion kindling in his eyes. “The one with you in the ballroom.”

The soldier. He couldn’t mean—No. I find myself shaking my head, as if to scatter the words. I want to pinch myself. I’m still in a nightmare; I must be. None of this makes sense.

“Graylin,” I whisper, my voice trembling, threatening to break. “How did this happen? Where did this Solarian thing come from?”

But Graylin doesn’t seem to hear me. His gaze is intent on Marcus and the magic streaming from his hands.

Sal is the one who answers, his voice heavy with regret. “The Solarian door,” he says. He scrubs his forehead with the heels of his hands. “It’s cracked.”

“And this thing escaped?” Willow looks more shaken than I’ve ever seen her. “How? Why now?”

“We can’t let them find out,” the Prince is saying, but I’m still stuck on Sal’s word, echoing over and over in my ears like struck metal. Cracked.

Cracked.

Cracked enough to let this monster through, just like the one that tore my brother from this world. I feel suddenly dizzy with the worst jolt of déjà vu.

“The door is open?” I croak.

No one answers; they just exchange tense glances. My pulse is a war drum in my ears. This can’t be real. Can’t be. I’ll go to the door. I’ll see that it’s the same as ever, just a stone wall framed by a dusty archway, and the nightmare will be over and I’ll wake up.

“Maddie!” Graylin is reaching for me, but I dodge him and dart into the hallway. I glance to my left, where the floor slopes down into a pool of darkness.

“Maddie, don’t go down there.” Graylin steps carefully toward me, like I’m a horse that might get spooked. His voice is misery. “Please don’t—”

Sick dread cascades over me. I don’t want to see it. I want to go back to bed and pretend this is all some Bosch-painted nightmare. But this is my home too and I have to know. I have to.

Graylin is shouting something else at me, but I’m already running.

I move through the inn, oblivious to its inhabitants, to the voices calling for me to slow down or watch out or explain what’s happening.